WATCH: Are You Keeping Up with Interactive Video Options?

Back in March, I wrote a blog post about the #1 New Skill All Video Content Creators Must Learn in 2015. The punchline of the article was that creating video content these days simply isn’t enough; a video storyteller must also be able to think strategically about player packaging, i.e. how all of the interactive elements currently available for video players influence both how you tell the story and how you serve it to your audience.

Today, I amend myself. Designing interactive player experiences is not only the most important new skill for video content creators; it’s actually the most important new skill any communications professional needs to acquire in 2015 – whether you are designing sales training material, customer service collateral, or brand marketing fare.

In May of 2014, I contributed an article to cmo.com foreshadowing the impact of player interactivity on video possibilities. We knew video interactivity was the future, but we had few examples of it. That was then. It’s September 2015, and the future is now reality. If you’re not currently considering how designing interactivity directly into your video experiences can boost your bottom line, you’re falling behind.

Consider this: leading companies out there are designing sharable video experiences to launch new products that include direct, in-frame purchasing or subscriptions; customer service teams are putting automated video delivery directly inside of their CRMs that allows in-frame annotation, so the service agent can better capture and share common problems and resolve calls more quickly. Companies who are stuck with YouTube as their video repository are getting smart and creating fully-customized “YouTube Wrappers” to control the brand experience outside of YouTube. And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

Here’s a little video we put together to showcase some of the fantastic interactive experiences that our customers have been employing to enhance the impact of their videos. Delivered to you in an interactive player, of course.

Bottom line: it’s not too late. But if you’re not thinking interactively with your videos, it’s time to beef up your knowledge in this area, before the rest of 2015 slips away.